Nigel Hughes resigns as AFC Leader

– Party calls “emergency” meeting to discuss ramifications

Just over one year after taking up the role, and less than a month after the party’s poor performance in the September 1 General and Regional Elections, Nigel Hughes has resigned as leader of the Alliance For Change (AFC).
This was confirmed by the AFC in a brief statement on Wednesday, detailing that the party’s General Secretary, Raphael Trotman, received “an updated letter purporting to be a letter of resignation, with immediate effect” from Hughes.
Hughes, an attorney-at-law by profession, was re-elected as the leader of the AFC in June 2024 at the party’s 8th National Conference – its highest decision-making forum.
“The National Executive Committee will be meeting in an emergency session to discuss the ramifications and consequences of such a letter and will be encouraging Mr Hughes to retract the same,” the AFC stated in Wednesday’s missive.
According to the party, if Hughes remains adamant in his decision to step down, then the party’s constitutional provisions will be used to guide the way forward.
Efforts by this newspaper to contact both Hughes and the party’s General Secretary on Wednesday for further details and comments on this development were futile.
This is the second time Hughes has resigned from a leadership position within the AFC. He had previously served as Chairman of the AFC but resigned back in April 2016 over “internal difficulties on a point of principle”.
Since his return to the helm of the party last year, Hughes began his “Better Must Come”-coined campaign into the 2025 General and Regional Elections, during which the party churned out a dismal performance and was booted from the National Assembly.
In a brief telephone interview with this publication earlier this month, Hughes had indicated that the AFC would be meeting shortly with all its members to conduct a thorough analysis of the 2025 polls.
“I do have an analysis, but I’d rather share it with the party first before I share it with the public. The party is going to meet shortly, and it will decide what rebuilding is needed. First of all, we have to do an analysis of the results, and based on that analysis, we will then determine what direction to take,” Hughes had stated.
The AFC contested the September 1 polls independently after the collapse of negotiations with its former coalition partner, the People’s National Congress (PNC)-led A Partnership for National Unity (APNU). The APNU and AFC had coalesced to contest the 2015 elections, which they won but failed to secure a second term at the 2020 polls.
In the lead-up to this year’s elections, there were attempts to revive the coalition pact, but at least one PNC official had stated that the Hughes-led AFC “went berserk” with its demands during the negotiations on governance sharing power.
The collapse of the coalition talks was further compounded with several top AFC members jumping ship and joining the AFC. In fact, Juretha Fernandes, who along with Sherod Duncan and Ricky Ramsaroop, as well as other prominent members that had cut ties with the AFC to sign onto APNU’s list of candidates, contested the recent elections as the prime ministerial candidate alongside APNU’s leader, Aubrey Norton.
At the September 1 polls, however, not only was the Hughes-led AFC kicked out of the benches of the Parliamentary opposition, but the Norton-led APNU was also ousted as the main Parliamentary opposition party.
The vote count at the 2025 General and Regional Elections showed that the AFC struggled to secure enough votes to earn a single seat in the National Assembly. The party, which went to the polls with Hughes and Indigenous rights advocate Laura George on its ticket, only managed to secure 1765 votes in the General Elections and 1833 in the Regional Elections.
Both the AFC’s and APNU’s Parliamentary influence were weakened at the hands of the We Invest Nationhood (WIN) – a new party headed by US-sanctioned businessman Azruddin Mohamed, which managed to grab votes from many of the former coalition partners’ traditional support bases.
Once an emerging third force in Guyana, the AFC had won five out of 65 seats in Parliament at the 2006 elections and seven in 2011. It teamed up with the APNU in 2015, and together they won that year’s elections, but their term was cut short in 2018 when the Government fell to a no-confidence motion.
In 2020, AFC’s popularity declined, with many accusing the party of being submissive to the PNC-led APNU during the coalition’s tenure in office. Following their loss at the 2020 polls, the APNU and AFC, together, held 31 seats in the National Assembly, thus forming the main Parliamentary opposition. Of these, the AFC itself had occupied nine of those seats, while the remaining 22 were held by APNU politicians.
At the September 1 polls, the People’s Progressive Party/Civic (PPP/C) recorded a landslide victory with some 133,432 votes, which earned the party 36 seats in the National Assembly. In the 65-seat House, WIN gained 16 seats, APNU 12 seats, and the Amanza Walton-Desir-led Forward Guyana Movement (FGM) copped one seat.